Glen Cook - Passage At Arms

Curiously, these filthy beasts spend most of their free time scrubbing every accessible surface with a solution that clears the sinuses in seconds. Our paintwork gleams. It's a paradox.

One point of luck. No lice or fleas have turned up. I expected herds of crab lice, acquired from hygienically lax girlfriends.

Fearless Fred is sulking. He's the most bored creature aboard. No one has seen him for days. But he's around, and in a foul mood. He expresses his displeasure by leaving odiferous little loaves everywhere. He's as moody as the Commander.

Something is bothering the Old Man. Something of which this patrol is just part. It began before the mission, before I found him at Marie's.

He's no longer my friend of Academy days.

I did expect to find him weathered by the Service, changed by the war. War has to change a man.

Combat is an intense experience. Comparing him to other classmates I've encountered recently, I can see how radical the changes are. Even Sharon wasn't this much transformed. The Sharon of the Pregnant Dragon always existed inside the other Sharon.

A few of the changes are predictable. An increased tendency toward withdrawal, toward selfcontainment, toward gloominess. Those were always part of him. Pressure and age would exaggerate them. No, the real change is the stratum of bitterness he conceals behind the standard changes.

He was never a bitter person. Contrarily, there was a playful, almost elfin streak behind his reserve. A little alcohol or a lot of coaxing could summon it forth.

Something has slain the elf.

Somehow, somewhere, while we were out of touch, he took one hell of an emotional beating. He got himself destroyed, and all the king's horses...

It's not a career problem. He's very successful by Navy standards. Twenty-six and already a full Commander. He's up for brevet Captain. He may get his first Admiral's star before he turns thirty.

It's something internal. He's lost a battle to something that's part of him. Something he hates and fears more than any enemy. He now despises himself for his own weakness.

He doesn't talk about it. He won't. And yet I think he wants to. He wants to lay it out for someone who knew him before his surrender. Someone not now close, yet someone who might know him well enough to show him the path back home.

I admit I was surprised that my request for assignment to his Climber went through. There were a hundred hurdles to surmount. The biggest, I expected, would be getting the Ship's Commander's okay. What Commander wants an extra, useless body aboard? But the affirmative came back like a ricochet. Now I know why, I think. He wants a favor for a favor.

The Commander's moods are a ship's moods. The men mirror their god-captain. He's aware of that and must live the role every minute. This's been the iron law of ships since the Phoenician mariners went down to the sea.

The role makes the Old Man's problem that much more desperate. He's tearing himself apart trying to keep his command from going sour. And he thinks he's failing.

So now he can't open up at all.

I now dread the future for more than the usual reasons. This is a miserably long patrol. And it's demonstrated repeatedly that the best Climber crew, highly motivated and well-officered, can start disintegrating.

More than once the Commander tracked me down and asked me to accompany him to the wardroom.

He makes a ritual of our visit. First he gives Kreiegshauser a carefully measured bit of coffee.

Just enough for two cups. There's been no regularly brewed real coffee since we learned we'd be on beacon-to-beacon patrol. What we call coffee, and brew daily, is made with a caffeine-rich Canaan bush-twig that has a vague coffee taste. That's what the Commander drinks during his morning ritual. After yielding his treasure, the Old Man stares into infinity and sucks the stem of his tireless pipe. He hasn't smoked in an age. The old hands say he won't till he decides to attack.

"You're going to chew that stem through."

He peers at the pipe as if surprised to find it in his hand. He turns it this way and that, studying the bowl. Finally, he takes a tiny folding knife and scrapes a fleck off the meerschaum.

He then plunges it into a pocket already bulging with pens, pencils, markers, a computer stylus, a hand calculator, and his personal notebook. I'd love to see his notes. Maybe he writes revelations to himself.

He has his ritual question. "Well, what do you think so far?"

What's to think? "I'm an observer. The fourth estate's eido." My response is a ritual, too. I can never think of anything flip, or anything to start him talking. We drift through these things, waiting for a change.

"Remarkable crew?" Today is going to be a little different.

"A few individuals. Not as a whole. I've seen them all before. A ship produces specific characters the way the body produces specialized cells."

"You have to get through the hide. Get inside, to the meat and bones."

"I don't think I'm that good." I'm not. I keep seeing the masks they want me to see, not the faces in hiding. I may have been exposed too long now. An immunological process may be taking place.

Something of the sort happens in every closed group. After jostling and jousting, the pieces of the jigsaw fall into place. People adjust, get along. And they stop being objective about one another.

The Old Man says, "Hmm." He's developing that sound into a vocabulary with the inflectional range of Chinese. This "hmm" means "do go on."

"We've got people who want to be something the ship has no niche for. Take Carmon. He believes his propaganda image. He wants to be Tannian's Horatio at the bridge. The rest of us won't let him."

"One right guess. Carmon aside, did you find anybody who gives a rat's ass about the war?"

Have I stumbled onto something? They are volunteers----- This is as near an expression of doubt as I'll ever hear from the Commander.

I'm too eager to pursue it. My sharp glance spooks him.

"What did you think of Marie?"

I think the relationship is symptomatic of a deeper problem. But I won't say that. "She was under a strain. An unexpected guest. You about to leave..." There're things a man doesn't do. One of mine: Never say anything bad about a friend's mate.

"She won't be there when we get back."

I knew that before we left.

Well, it isn't the realization of his own mortality that has gotten to him. This isn't the oddsclosing- in blues that plagues Climber Commanders. If I look closely, I can catch glimpses of the it can't happen to me of our age group.

Is it the realization of his own fallibility? Suppose last patrol he made a grotesque error and got away with it through dumb luck? The kind of man he is, that would bother him bad because fortyseven men might have gone out with him.

Maybe. But that's more the kind of thing that would break a Piniaz. The Old Man never claimed to be perfect. Just close to it.

"She'll be gone when I get home." His eyes are long ago and far away. He had had these thoughts before. "She won't leave a note, either."

"You really think so?" I nearly missed the cues telling me to ask.

Marie isn't his problem. A problem, and a symptom, but not the problem.

"Just a feeling, say. You saw how we got along. Cats and dogs. Only reason we stayed together was we didn't have anywhere to go. Not that it didn't look worse."

"In a way."

"What?"

"Hell probably offers a sense of security to the damned."

"Yes. I suppose." He draws his pipe from his pocket, examines its bowl. "You know Climber Fleet One hasn't ever had a deserter? Could be."

For a moment I envision the man as an old-time sea captain, master on a windjammer, standing a lonely, nighted weather-deck, staring at moon-frosted wavetops while a cold breeze fingers his strawlike hair and beard. The sea is obsidian. The wake churns and boils. It glimmers with bioluminescence.